Don’t You Forget About Me(74)

‘Lucas, that is …’ I swallow. I’ve gone from wanting to hard swerve all this, to wanting very much to be the friend he needs: ‘Unhappy couples fight, and say things they might regret later all the time. You no more knew what was round the corner than Niamh or Owen did. The lack of compassion in saying that … what a bastard.’

‘Thank you.’ He finishes the whisky. ‘Mind if I have more? Another for you?’

I nod and hand my glass up. There’s only the sound of Keith’s light snoring until he returns.

‘Waaaait. That’s why you didn’t want me walking Keith?’ I say.

‘Oh? Yeah. I think Owen’s an unpredictable mess and I don’t let Keith out of my sight in case he decides to repatriate him to Ireland. I thought I was subtle in turning you down?’

‘You weren’t subtle,’ I laugh and Lucas says: ‘Sorry.’

A brief silence.

‘I don’t know how to grieve Niamh. There’s not many handbooks out there for how to be sad at the death of someone who, at the time, you wanted to kill.’

‘Try a counsellor. They honestly help.’

‘Really?’

‘I went to one too,’ I say. ‘When the relationship with the person who’s gone is complicated, my counsellor used the analogy of a clean wound versus a dirty wound. The clean one is still a wound, but the healing is more straightforward. When it’s like an explosion of shrapnel, there’s infections, there’s secondary cuts. That takes longer to heal, and it heals differently. You have to accept the damage is different.’

I didn’t, for a moment, ever forecast I’d one day be sitting with Lucas McCarthy, repeating this. Fay and I were talking about two men I knew, and one of them is in front of me.

Lucas sits forward. ‘Do you mind me asking who you lost?’

‘My dad.’

‘And you went to see a counsellor about it?’

Somehow, although I could tell the edited version of this history, I already know Lucas is going to be the first and only person other than Fay to hear the full.

The emotion is blunted by Lagavulin and yet I still have to pace myself.

‘I was very close to my dad …’ I’ll have to deliver a sentence at a time and sort myself out in the pauses.

‘You don’t have to talk about this, you know,’ Lucas says.

‘No, no. I want to. I visited from university after a month. You know, huge bag of washing, you feel like a character who’s been on some epic journey, forever changed by their travels.’

Lucas laughs, softly.

‘Ah yes. You think you’re Frodo. Or is it Bilbo.’

‘I told my mum I was coming home that weekend, and my dad hadn’t been informed. My mum and my dad not communicating was kind of a hallmark of their relationship. If my dad had known, he’d have been fired up to see me, chippy tea, he’d have bought a bottle of wine. Instead I get home, travel weary from the far-off land of Newcastle and expecting this fanfare and no one’s home. But that’s OK. I threw all my washing in the machine, made myself a five-slices-of-bread-tall sandwich, head upstairs to scarf it.’

Lucas smiles and I think I see genuine affection towards me.

‘Then, thanks to being an underslept fresher, I fall asleep. When I woke up, I could hear my dad’s voice. I sneak downstairs quietly, all ready to shout “SURPRISE, it’s me!” and I twig that he’s not talking to someone in the house, he’s on the landline in the hallway.’

Time hasn’t dulled this impact. Even now, twelve years later, I feel almost as shocked as I did when it happened. I also feel like I’m betraying Dad by recounting it. I’d never known until now that’s why I’ve kept it to myself. To protect him.

‘And … he’s saying things, obviously to a woman. Not things you ever, ever want to hear your dad say. Things he’s going to do to her. Things he’d like her to do to him. Oh God, Lucas, porny stuff. I’ve actually managed to block a lot of it out. The C word featured.’

‘Ah, no,’ Lucas puts a hand to his forehead. ‘That’s … that’s so rough.’

‘Yeah. So I’m halfway down the stairs, I can’t move without him hearing or seeing me and I’m coming to terms with the fact I now know he’s having an affair.’

I catch my breath. ‘He hangs up. He sees me. He absolutely loses his shit about me earwigging on him, as a way of dealing with what he knows I heard. I’m scared, I lose my shit at him. I say how awful it is to Mum, to me, to my sister. What a terrible dad and husband he is.’

Deep breaths, Georgina, I tell myself. Like Fay said.

‘He stood and took it all. He couldn’t do anything else. I avoided him for the rest of the weekend, and went back to Newcastle. In pieces.’

Another deep breath.

‘He calls me, a day later, conciliatory, and offered to drive up to Newcastle to see me. I told him to piss off.’

Just as I think I’ve got through this, I break. I break completely on the words piss off. I put my face in my hands and my shoulders shake as I weep. This is kept in a safely locked box most of the time, and I try to mislay the key. Sometimes when I open it, the contents feel like they could consume me.

Moments later, I feel Lucas crouching next to me. He puts his arm around me, and without thinking I turn and sob into his shoulder. The fabric smells of him, in a nice way. He is bigger and broader than the boy I was heavy petting with in the park. I wish I could lose myself into this embrace, and not only because of who he is and what he was to me. It feels so good to have someone hold me. It eases this immovable pain in my chest.